Piyush

Product Designer | open for work

[Dharmesh Ba @dharmeshba]

I keep thinking about the doorman fallacy Rory Sutherland keeps referring to.

A hotel can replace a doorman with an automatic door and call it efficiency.

On paper, it saves money.

But the balance sheet only sees one job: opening the door. It does not see everything else the doorman was doing.

He was security. He was status. He was recognition. He was the first human signal that this place is cared for. He noticed who came in. He made regular guests feel known. He made strangers feel watched. He made the hotel feel like a hotel.

This is the danger of cost cutting. It often removes value that was never measured.

Many businesses make this mistake. They define a human role too narrowly, automate the visible function, and then wonder why the experience feels worse.

A receptionist is not just answering calls. A call center agent is not just closing tickets. A postman is not just delivering letters.

Human beings carry invisible value.

They create trust, warmth, reassurance, and memory. These things are hard to quantify, so finance departments treat them as waste.

But customers don't behave like numbers inside an excel sheet.

They live with feelings and emotions that are hard to measure.

And sometimes the thing you remove to save cost was the thing that made people trust you.

[Piyush @piycreates]

@iamsahilvhora would love to get your feedback on https://t.co/ro1LH7bfgg

[Piyush @piycreates]

previous product design work @ bondub 🦚

[Piyush @piycreates]

tried reddit, tried Framer community, tried reaching out to support, still haven't got an answer @framer . Why can't people use tabs dynamic filter in CMS even after paying while free versions have that option. I don't think its fair

[Piyush @piycreates]

Comparison Table

[Piyush @piycreates]

@radiofun8 how did you manage to get the wavy gradients moving?

[Piyush @piycreates]

A hero section for an AI video generator 🪄

[Piyush @piycreates]

@PaperId81120 @charmiekapoor that's where communities come in the picture, that's also one of the reasons you show-up shamlessly, post your work, ask for feedback from seniors

[Charmie Kapoor @charmiekapoor]

[For every designer who is scared right now 🩶]

If the AI stress is catching up to you or you're feeling left behind, take out 5 mins and read this.

Nobody really knows how to survive this 'wave'. Even the people building these AI products don't know the future. And if someone's handing you a clear cut path, they're probably selling something.

I'm writing this based on the people I know. Some of them are building these tools, some are switching roles. Many just reached out because they didn't know who else to ask.

Over the last ten years, I have watched parts of this industry shift. Photoshop to Illustrator to Sketch to Figma. Each time the tool changed, the designer role also evolved. With AI, this is a much bigger move, but that sense of fear feels exactly the same.

Here's what I'm actually seeing:

Design roles are contracting.
It is real. The junior and intern-level work is the most exposed right now, because AI can do a lot of what a new designer would spend their first year learning.

Senior designers with strong networks and reputations are largely okay, but not untouchable. Many managers honestly, are more worried than they're letting on. A lot of them haven't touched tools in years.

There's also something happening with hiring where managers aren't bringing on juniors right now. Some of it is tight budgets, but a lot of it is that they don't know how to grow someone in this environment anymore. There's no clear ladder to point to.

–

The roles that remain look different.
Companies are now deliberately building out senior and principal IC tracks so the best craft people don't have to choose between growing and managing. A senior designer who goes extremely deep, who has strong taste, ships things and shapes product decisions, is very valuable today.

The new shape for a design manager is someone who should also build. They should use tools to prototype fast, validate ideas quickly, show rather than tell. A manager who can demo something in a meeting rather than describe it is a completely different asset.

UX writing, content design, marketing are merging into product thinking in a way they weren't before. Designers who can write, actually write well are powerful.

–

Experiment on your own before it's pushed on you.
The design process is changing. The double diamond, the wireframe, the detailed case studies are starting to feel dated. What's replacing it has a lot more building and shipping than documenting and presenting.

Don't upskill frantically. Just because a new tool dropped doesn't mean you have to master it. At this rate you'll just burn out chasing things. Pick one process you already do and figure out where AI actually helps within it. Pressure test an idea, poke holes in your reasoning, generate great visuals, explore a direction you'd have killed too early. Get really good at one or two things vs half baked many.

Don't get attached to tools. The designers who struggled most through every tool shift were the ones whose identity was too tied to what they already knew. Being the best Framer person in the room was never the point. It was always the work itself.

–

Learn some code. Even a little.
I say this as someone who never wrote code before. Think of it like a 30-day experiment, not a career change. I can share more on how I approached this because I know how intimidating that sentence sounds.

Build live things. No one wants static mocks sitting in Figma. See if you can do interactive project demos, solve your own problems by building small tools, push things out, let people use them. A live product in your portfolio right now is worth more than ten polished case studies with no shipping story behind them.

–

People want a point of view. Generic work is losing.
Execution is cheap now. A lot of work is starting to look the same and the ones standing out have something to say. Bring that to your work.

Freelancing overall has a lot more money in it right now. But if you're producing generic, template-level work, you're probably in danger. Niche and specific is where the premium is going, and that gap is only going to widen.

A lot of people who joined design during the covid wave, drawn by the stability or the salary or the sense that the process was settled, will probably leave. That's okay, maybe even good. Design has always been a craft that changes. The ones who stay will be the ones who actually want to build things.

–

Be someone people want to work with.
Being easy to work with is underrated and always will be. Being collaborative, fun to work with, easy to communicate with async – all this builds up over years in ways no tool can replicate. I've seen technically average designers outlast brilliant ones because of exactly this.

Being a good hire isn't just your portfolio. People imagine what it would be like to talk to you, brainstorm with you, disagree with you, and sit in a room with you for two hours every week. Work on that too.

Who you surround yourself with matters too. If you don't have people to look up to at your work, find small tight communities that do the kind of work you like and actually share it. I prefer these over large noisy ones. Some big Discord ones are mostly anxiety and self-promotion.

–

If you're early career, this is for you specifically.
I've had many recent grads and those just finishing a bootcamp struggling to find work. I want to say this clearly that is not a reflection of your ability. The timing is just brutal right now and that's not on you.

If you're just starting out, look for lean startups or agencies. They still desperately need designers who can think and move fast. Get in the room first and figure out long term plans from there.

Hiring pipelines are filled due to mass applications. Post your work online, share WIP experiments, DM the founder whose app you redesigned just for fun. Nobody is coming to find you. You have to shamelessly show up.

–

More people are building now because friction has never been lower. A lot of them are discovering mid-build that design is what separates good from forgettable. That's not nothing.

There's also a new kind of client emerging. Solo builders, indie founders, one-person companies shipping at scale. They don't need a design team but one designer who can build alongside them. That role is growing and it's genuinely interesting work.

Yes there's anxiety. But there's also more to build and more personality to showcase. That's where I'd put my energy.

[Piyush @piycreates]

@AdityaSur11 Have you adjusted the curves for the animation? Because it's coming out pretty smooth. Generally smart animate (ease in/out) doesn't come out smooth. You can see some parts of opacity fading in and out. Looks unpolished.

The one is polished. What's the trick?

[Wall of Portfolios @wallofportfolio]

🎉Featuring @piycreates on Wall of Portfolios! Check out his inspiring work and journey in design here:

https://t.co/AA1lQmxUHd

#wallofportfolios #portfoliodesignidea #portfolioinspiration #bestportfolio

[Piyush @piycreates]

@KrishnaShamji @Razorpay_Design Thanks for the notes! Do you know if I can watch the recording anywhere?

[Piyush @piycreates]

@sunalsood One of the logical takes

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

when software had a soul

there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.

the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.

software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.

the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.

nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.

somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.

A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.

and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.

now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.

which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.

when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.

this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.

here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.

AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.

the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.

if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.

that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

[Piyush @piycreates]

@pixelandpump One & only con of being jacked